As is known in the art, for most if not all learning activities, a substantial amount of an instructor's time and effort is devoted to evaluating and monitoring the quality of students' work, and thus, hopefully, the depth of their learning. The purpose of this monitoring, however, is not merely the determination of grades; part of the instructor's work is entirely self-reflective, enabling the instructor to concurrently, or ideally even preemptively, intervene to make adjustments to course pedagogy based on students' engagement or understanding. While assigning grades might be facile, some difficulties complicate this second objective: how might an instructor intuit when, precisely, students have understood the material sufficiently? Making this determination manually would prove an intensely laborious and time consuming process, far more complicated than simple reading and re-reading of any single student's work.
When students engage in a writing activity, the final evaluation of their work cannot only assess whether the student has provided the most closely correct answer. Process is just as relevant to student writing as content. Student writing considered by an instructor to be exceptional is generally seen as that which demonstrates a mastery of the course material in new, profound or statistically unusual ways. The ideal is not only for students to confirm that they've understood lectures, but to do so in ways that even the instructor might not have thought of.
This process of mastery need not take place all at once. As a student is continually exposed to the same material, or is given the independent opportunity to rethink, reframe, or revisit that material, their writing on the subject has the chance to evolve, from rote regurgitation to wholly original expression. At the level of language, this evolution is reflected through recasting.
Recasting is the learning process whereby a student refines his or her understanding of a concept found in course lectures or readings by putting that concept into his or her own words. In the acquisition of new languages especially, this process can be useful, because it allows students to acquire new vocabulary using the assortment of words already available to them. Even where the student's understanding of a language is not an explicit concern, recasting can mark a student's attempts to graduate to more sophisticated or professionalized terminology, or, inversely but to the same end, to place new concepts into terms that are nearer to what the student would naturally be more likely to say. This process of learning aligns with theories of schema formulation, the sense-making process known as “scaffolding”, as well as the express principles of educational constructivism.
For an instructor, the simple identification of recast terminology within a student's written work can provide an effective barometer for pedagogical self-reflection. If a subset of terms or concepts are deemed vital to the syllabus, repetitions and recast iterations of those same terms will at least suggest that those terms are being acknowledged and reflected upon.